If there’s one thing companies love … it’s love! As long as it’s Pride Month and they can profit off of it. In honor of Pride, Ikea has released a collection of love seats, each inspired by flags of different identities across the LGBTQ+ spectrum. And I gotta be honest: I would very much like to lay on all of them.
Each piece was designed or created by an artist who is part of the 2SLGBTQ+ community — an acronym which also includes those who are two-spirit, an Indigenous term that encompasses the spectrum of gender and sexuality. There are love seats inspired by the asexual flag, the bisexual flag, the lesbian flag, the pansexual flag, and more. All ten of the sofas are accompanied by a story about the artist or the person who inspired the design.
There seems to be particular debate about the bisexual couch, which has a lot to take in. There are the hands, the literal arms on the armrests, the hands, the words, and did I mention the hands? Brian Lanigan, the poet whose work inspired artist Charlotte Carbone’s sofa design, gave context to the words featured on the piece — “When you change ‘or’ to ‘and,’ nobody believes you.” They’re part of a poem he wrote in high school about “bisexual erasure [he] experienced from an ex-partner and others.” Thankfully, Lanigan seems to taking any comments in good spirits as he’s changed his Twitter display name to “bisexual couch guy brian.”
I will say, the photos don’t do justice to many of the love seats. The promotional video, on the other hand, has only reaffirmed that, yes, I would love to be engulfed by the tulle on the asexual sofa and consumed by the coziness of the cloud couch featuring the trans flag colors. I also don’t trust myself with whatever power I would be imbued with were I to sit on the Midsommar/Annihilation-esque “progress” loveseat.
To Ikea’s credit, the love seats don’t appear to be for sale. I think that’s for the best, as trying to assemble the pieces of the “progress” couch would be a near impossible task.
Of course, the existence of a lesbian couch, a bisexual couch, a genderfluid couch, etc. implies the existence of straight, cisgender pieces of living-room furniture. Maybe a La-Z-Boy? At the very least, the collection has confirmed what I’ve suspected of my current couch — a gray chaise sofa that I got from Nebraska Furniture mart; it’s extremely heterosexual, isn’t it?